Guardians of the Living Landscape

At dawn in the Vercors mountains, shepherd Marie-Claire Vignon guides her flock of 400 sheep across alpine meadows that her family has grazed for five generations. Each movement is deliberate - avoiding rare orchid colonies, allowing recently grazed areas to recover, moving through forests to create firebreaks. "People think shepherding is just watching sheep eat," she says, scanning the horizon for weather changes. "But we're landscape architects, fire preventers, biodiversity managers. The mountains look 'natural,' but they're shaped by millennia of grazing. Without us, forests would swallow these meadows within decades."

This understanding - that rural communities create and maintain landscapes often perceived as "natural" - underpins evolving concepts of environmental stewardship in rural France. Far from being mere exploiters of nature, rural inhabitants increasingly position themselves as essential partners in conservation, their traditional practices often proving more sustainable than industrial alternatives.